At the SAS Institute Inc. CIO Suzanne Gordon said that security occupies the top spot on the Cary, N.C., software firm’s 2004 wish list. Gordon said that SAS will have a rolling forecast and look at the budget every quarter, so if the company needs a weapon to combat a Blaster worm is needed, she can get it.
For Tsvi Gal, CIO of Warner Music Group in New York, Web services and service-level management in heterogeneous environments, as well as digital rights management, rank in the upper tiers of his list.
Both said that disaster recovery (DR) investments are high priorities, which is in keeping with Forrester’s prediction that DR will be right behind security on the CIO shopping list. Gal said that his company is moving from a model in which DR is considered an issue only for IT departments to one that gets business divisions involved.
The emphasis on DR and business continuity isn’t only a CIO priority, according to Bob Doyle of Dallas-based RPD Global Consulting and a CIO for more than two decades, most recently with Fleming Companies. Rounding out Forrester’s top five CIO priorities for 2004: upgrading existing applications and desktops (“business-as-usual investments” as Gal called them) and compliance with new laws, namely the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
IT outsourcing, one of the hottest topics in 2003, finished closer to the bottom of the 2004 priority pile, with only 24% of respondents saying that they would be exploring outsourcing alternatives in 2004, and only 17% said that moving IT work offshore was of the utmost importance. Forrester finding — that of the firms that already use offshore providers, 68% will send even more work overseas in 2004.
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